Laid-off IT workers worry U.S. is losing tech jobs to outsourcing

UC San Francisco is contracting out IT work to an Indian offshoring firm, and a known H-1B visa program user.

Credit: Michael Kan

Sixty-three-year-old Bob Zhang is worried about the future of tech jobs in the U.S. Will the high-paying positions be a thing of the past?

Zhang said it's already starting to happen. He's one of 79 IT workers from the University of California, San Francisco, who've been laid off. Tuesday was their last day on the job. To replace them, the school is outsourcing some of their work to an Indian firm.

"Usually, they outsource the low-paying jobs," he said at a gathering outside a school building. "But now they use H-1B (visa) and use foreign workers to replace the high-paying jobs. This trend is dangerous."

It was a sentiment shared among the laid-off IT workers, who've tried to push the school to save their positions, to no avail. Now they fear other publicly funded universities will take the same approach and replace U.S. employees with foreign workers.

"It's everybody's problem," said Jeff Tan, another laid-off staffer. "I think there are lasting effects to what happens here."

The layoffs at the school have grabbed headlines, because it's a rare instance of a publicly funded university outsourcing and offshoring IT work to an Indian company, allegedly through the use of the federal H-1B visa program.

That program contains loopholes, critics say, that have allowed U.S. companies to bring foreign IT workers to replace jobs once held by U.S. citizens.

In its defense, the university has said the outsourcing will save more than $30 million over five years, at a time when the school is struggling to deal with rising costs.

"IT costs on the university's clinical side nearly tripled between 2011 and 2016," the university said in a statement on Tuesday. "This growth rate is not sustainable."

As a result, the university is contracting out some of the work to HCL, an offshoring outsourcing Indian company well known for its use of H-1B visas. But the school said none of the lost jobs are being filled with H-1B visa holders.

The laid-off workers say this isn't the case. Before they left their positions, some trained their incoming replacements from HCL, which they suspect are on H-1B visas and will work at the school.

"Once you send out the manufacturing jobs, once you send out the service jobs, once you send out the research jobs, what's left? There's nothing left," said Tan, who's 55 and now looking for a new job.

Kurt Ho, another laid-off worker, said he was paid an annual salary of about $110,000, but the new workers replacing these jobs will receive a fraction of that amount.